Author Archives: Caitlin Coakley Beckner

It’s no joke – the House has passed a budget on April Fool’s day, after nearly 17 hours of deliberation and discussion that began the previous afternoon.

Discussions started at 3:30 p.m. yesterday in the House Appropriations Committee. From there, the bills moved through the House Rules Committee, then the Committee of the Whole, and finally to a vote. The House finally adjourned at 8 a.m. today.

The House this morning pushed back a long-awaited hearing of Senate budget bills passed earlier this month, but the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee said the spending plan will definitely be considered later today.

Opponents of Arizona’s Clean Elections system are optimistic about the latest measure to effectively kill public campaign financing in Arizona. The House, where similar measures have died in the past, has a Republican supermajority of legislators elected on promises of fiscal responsibility. Now is the perfect time, they say, to pass a measure they call the “No Taxpayer Subsidies for Political Campaigns Act.” But there is a catch: Nine of the chamber’s 15 new Republicans were elected using publicly paid-for campaigns, and not all of them are enlisting in the stop-Clean-Elections crusade.

A month after Arizona enacted a series of corporate tax cuts aimed at stimulating job growth and turning around the state’s struggling economy, Arizona economists are mixed in their assessment of the law.

The vote on the firearms omnibus bill was contentious in the Senate, but some of the measure’s backers are saying it will face a tougher fight in the House — if only because it could possibly be thwarted on the very first step.

The House has approved a measure that will give $5 million to Pinal County to fight drug smugglers, despite opposition from Democrats who said the money would be better spent paying for a transplant program that was cut last year.